Jason Cook interview

You may have seen that Hebburn, BBC Two's hit Geordie sitcom, has been recommissioned for a second series. We coincidentally had a chat with creator and plays-Ramsey-actor Jason Cook a couple of weeks ago, which we've just dug out to give a feel of where the show might go next, as well as an update on his plans for a local festival...

Jason Cook: Fresh Meat has an excellent gag rate

Jason Cook, who wrote and stars in Hebburn, tells Metro why he thinks Fresh Meat - and particularly Kimberley Nixon - is the best thing on TV.

The sitcom wedding is a signature event that can often be mishandled, but the final instalment in Jason Cook's series brings both light and shade to Jack and Sarah's nuptials, only occasionally teetering on the tightrope between heartwarming and sappy. And, as it's second time around for the happy couple, the pressure is on: Pauline is baking a 'fruity skyscraper' and Sarah's mum brandishes her snobbery like a crucifix as she enters the Geordie heartland. The emotional sucker-punch at which the show has sometimes hinted does come, albeit from an unexpected source - another example of Hebburn threatening comforting predictability, only to give it a gentle swerve. Even so, over the course of the series, a few tricks have been recycled a few too many times (especially the camera pan to reveal an unexpected eavesdropper), but we'd still welcome a second series of this sleepiest of sleeper hits.

Jason Cook's Geordie sitcom is hardly at the cutting edge of comedy, tending to loiter somewhere around the periphery of The Royle Family/Gavin & Stacey section of the genre. But its heart is in the right place, and Gina McKee and Jim Moir (aka Vic Reeves) give well-judged performances that are a delight. This week the clueless Jack demonstrates how not to behave at a job interview, while mum Pauline explains why it's important Jack and Sarah move out of the cramped family home. "They need their own space or they'll end up like apes in the zoo wandering round in circles flinging their poo about," she says. Nice.

Video: Interview with Steffen Peddie (Big Keith)

Speaking exclusively to Giggle Beats, Steffen Peddie talks openly about playing Big Keith in the BBC2 sitcom Hebburn, working on the show with mates Jason Cook and Chris Ramsey, going out on the lash with Vic Reeves and the future of North East comedy.

Hebburn is that rare thing, a good, warm, funny new sitcom. This is tempting fate, but it may remind you of another romcom about a young couple and their families. Yes, the sacred memory that is Gavin & Stacey. It has the same director for a start, and writer Jason Cook knows how to make characters big but believable.

This week, Pauline (Gina McKee) is still angry at Jack for getting married without telling her, while Joe (Jim Moir) has a plan to win her round. Look out for a lovely, understated sight gag involving a fist bump, and some vicious comedy in Dot's old people's home.

Profile: Hebburn creator Jason Cook

When Jason Cook was in the Merchant Navy, he used to write sketches for a friend back home in Newcastle. He'd pop them in a big brown envelope and ship them back to Tyneside, where his mate would perform them at The Hyena Comedy Club.

Radio Times review

If you sat down in front of BBC2's new sitcom Hebburn (Thursdays) wanting to be annoyed by another portrayal of common people as naïve oddballs, it didn't completely let you down. Fresh Meat star Kimberley Nixon was Sarah, the new wife of Jack (Chris Ramsey), who'd left the north-east to become a journalist but was now back to introduce his bride. His family cheerily struggled to cope with Sarah being posh, Jewish (Jack's mum threw their bacon in the bin and turned baps into bagels with an apple corer) and southern (her parents live in York).

Basically it was an extended version of the scene in The Royle Family where Anthony brings home Emma the vegetarian, and Nanna asks, "Can she have wafer-thin ham?" But what the Hebburn lot also share with the Royles is feeling warm and real. Jason Cook's script was particularly thoughtful when drawing Jack's parents, and was backed by a double casting coup: the faultless Gina McKee in a rare comic role as the hysterically proud mum, and Jim Moir/Vic Reeves, as good here as he was in Eric & Ernie as a dad who took five minutes to emerge from the kitchen when the son he adores came home. He looked happiest when Jack cracked a bad joke that could have been one of his.

Cook hasn't smashed any paradigms - Hebburn's first episode built predictably, if skilfully, to a standard sitcom finale - but he's writing about his own home town, with love. The people and relationships weren't common, but universal.

Jason Cook has written this likeable sitcom inspired by his own upbringing in the north east of England. It is set in the real-life town of the title and pitches somewhere between The Royle Family and Rab C Nesbitt. We're talking bawdy but warm: salt-of-the-earth eccentrics, caricatures of family life and a good dose of smut.

Our young hero Jack escaped Hebburn to work as a journalist in Manchester; when he returns it is to introduce his family to Sarah, a PhD student he married in Las Vegas. "Hebburn's where dreams come to die," he warns Sarah as they arrive. Even where the comedy feels broad (when Jack's mum learns that Sarah is Jewish she panics and cuts holes in buns with an apple corer to make bagels) it comes off, thanks to a strong cast that includes Gina McKee and an understated Jim Moir, aka Vic Reeves.

Gavin & Stacey has a lot to answer for: in its wake have trailed a slew of gentler, flabbier, less funny copycats. Jason Cook's Hebburn - named after the Newcastle suburb 'where dreams come to die' and this com comes to sit - is, on the surface, more of the same. There's culture clash (nice Jewish girl marries into rough northern family with collective heart of gold). Overbearing family (inappropriate dad, slutty sister, smothering mum). And flashes of a darker wit at work (a death at a pub, a fatalistic grandmother, a flurry of fine-tuned Jewish jokes).

Gina McKee is the pick of a solid cast, throwing everything (including her broadest Geordie accent) into her eager-to-please mother, and the climax is a well-mounted mess of vomit, corpses and spilt secrets. You'd struggle to call it ambitious - but it is undoubtedly funny.